News

Hill weed-wacks the greenies

By Bill Moss, Published: September 11, 2024

As Henderson County commissioners near the end of their three-year journey to rewrite the county’s land development plan, two commissioners are raising objections about information sources that are climate-change oriented.

“Reading through this, there are a few entities of great concern to me,” Commissioner David Hill said during the board’s regular meeting last week. “We have the Green Growth Toolbox in N.C. Wildlife. We have the Regional Resiliency Advisory Board, which is through the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency and the Rebuild NC website, and then you’ve got Riverlink.

“All these are progressive policy-pushing entities,” he explained. “If you go with these folks here and bring them into our plans, they’re going to push regulations. It’s going to cost (in) higher housing, living costs, higher taxes. There’s always a big push for climate change in each one of these. I’m sorry, that’s just junk science right now.”

The three “junk science” peddlers were among the more than two dozen “coordinating resources” listed in a matrix of the county comp plan, which commissioners adopted in March. 

Land-use regs become ‘militant’

Daniel Andreotta, who has followed Hill’s drumbeat of retreat from the more aggressive land conservation and flood regulation policies in a draft comp plan, declared that the land-use rewrite threatens freedom. (The Republican-dominated N.C. General Assembly mandates that all 100 N.C. counties adopt a comprehensive land-use plan.)

“The concept of a state-forced comprehensive land use plan — remember, it’s citizen-owned land — makes me uncomfortable at the very beginning,” he said. “What this does is pave the way for special interests of whatever nature and kind to govern land that citizens own, citizens paid for. We tax them on it. And so anything we can do to keep the freedom that is granted by our Creator and affirmed by our nation’s documents when it comes to land use, I’m in favor of. No, I don’t think you ought to have an asphalt plant beside an elementary school or anything like that. But this whole agenda of land-use guidelines is getting more and more, in my word ‘militant,’ in its rules and regulations.”

It was startling to hear Andreotta warn of “special interests governing land that citizens own” when the most powerful interest of all — the Board of Commissioners— voted last month to deny a perfectly reasonable rezoning request for a subdivision at Livingston Farms — between two existing subdivisions of similar density. Andreotta joined commissioners Rebecca McCall, Bill Lapsley and Michael Edney in that denial of landowners’ rights to build on their property. Hill voted no on the motion to deny the rezoning. Andreotta didn’t manage a peep then about the injustice of the county’s militant land-use sword governing “land that citizens own.”

What do ‘green’ agencies do?

Based on their own descriptions, the “progressive policy-pushing” government shops and nonprofits that Hill fears sound more advisory than dictatorial:

• Part of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, the Green Growth Toolbox “incorporates habitat conservation into land-use plans, policies and ordinances and development location, review and site design and develop habitat management plans for parks and open space.” The toolbox “is designed to help communities conserve high quality habitats as communities and developers continue to build new homes, workplaces, and shopping centers.” (Emphasis added.)
• RiverLink, which promotes watershed health, land conservation and environmental education, “advances its mission through innovative and restorative projects, reclaiming or improving priority areas that influence the health of the French Broad River.”
• A partnership of the state of North Carolina, the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the state Climate Office, the Regional Resilience Advisory Board oversees the N.C. Resilience Exchange, which “provides the most current and relevant information to North Carolina’s communities.” That includes “local-level climate projections.”

Good to know the county has deleted this resource; far better for us to go seat of the pants than to use scientific date when it comes to protecting farmland, residential and commercial property and infrastructure from floods, hurricanes, freezes and other threats.

While Hill courageously charged the pitch to annihilate two obscure bureaucratic outposts, he spared more than two dozen other government entities, advisory bodies and nonprofits listed as information sources.

“Coordinating resources” that survive in the 2045 comp plan include Conserving Carolina, U.S. Forest Service, WNC Source, NCDOT, UNC Health Pardee, Recreation Advisory Board, AARP, Housing Assistance Corp., Partnership for Economic Development, the Rail Trail Advisory Committee, Friends of Ecusta Trail, AgHC, French Broad MPO, BRCC, Farmland Preservation Task Force, Council on Aging, the Asheville Housing Coalition, the Library Board of Trustees, Friends of the Library, Land of Sky regional council and others.

Neither Hill nor Andreotta identified offending policies or actions that caused them to yank the green toolbox, the resiliency board and Riverlink as  coordinating resources. Nor did they offer evidence that the surviving resources are climate-change neutral. Do they really posit that none of those nonprofits or government offices has any policy goals that react to or adjust for climate change or seek to mitigate harm from it?

‘We’re supposed to be dead now’

Hill sees no value in listening to forecasts around climate change — hotter weather, flooding, harsher storms, warm winters that cause our apple crop to bloom too early and thus get snuffed by spring frosts and freezes. And he persuaded four other commissioners to vote with him in censoring warnings on the subject.

“I remember in the ’70s, we were supposed to freeze to death, and for the last 30 years, 40 years, every 10 years, we’re supposed to be dead now,” Hill said. “That’s their push. So we don’t need this progressive influence in our comp plan.”

Whatever the county’s new 2045 comp plan delivers in terms of growth management, it won’t be influenced by the Green Growth Toolbox, Rebuild NC or RiverLink. While David Hill has chain-sawed those three saplings, a grove of similar agencies survives. I’m sure that the climate change denying caucus laments that, after December, Hill and Andreotta will no longer be around to warn commissioners about the “junk science” from the science-based “policy-pushing” agencies.

* * * * *

Reach Hendersonville Lightning editor Bill Moss at billmoss@hendersonvillelightning.com.